Emptiness is usually imagined as silence, but Francis Scudellari gives his a noise, and an unpleasant one. «My hollow has a metal sound,» the title says, and the opening lines prove it: "A hinged flap clangs, / tapping against its empty cylinder." The speaker's inner void becomes a piece of cheap hardware, a loose lid knocking against a tube with nothing in it. What follows is an attempt to fill that hollow, a failure, and then an unexpectedly gentle way of imagining it filled.
The attempt is a trap, and the poem's language already hints that it will go wrong. The speaker lays it "to catch a glimpse of a gleam," a phrase that glints on the tongue because of its repeated g and l sounds. But the trap holds only "cinders," the leftovers of something already burnt out. The gleam "leaped from a small crinkle / in the steel, and got free / before I could show it how much // I loved it." The line break stalls on "how much," and the last three words then stand alone, stranded like the speaker. There is a quiet irony here: nobody sets a trap for something they love, and the poem seems to know it.
With eyes closed, the speaker sees "flares of color," and the poem organises them by weekday. Monday is red, "a ruby splatter creeping / its stain of warmth to the very edge." Tuesday is blue, "a sapphire pool slowly spreading its wet / to cool off Monday's hot." Turning adjectives into nouns ("its wet," "Monday's hot") gives the lines a blunt, painterly shorthand. Red and blue are followed by a missing yellow, and the poem seems to be counting out a set of primary colors, with Wednesday meant to complete it. That is an inference from the text, but it explains why the escaped gleam matters so much. Even the colors that do arrive are jewels, hard and mineral, so the speaker's inner world is never far from stone and metal.
Without the yellow, the vision collapses into "a black / velvet landscape they've re-placed inside / a cheap aluminum frame." The unnamed "they" and the hyphenated "re-placed" suggest something rearranged or swapped by forces outside the speaker's control. The frame is metal again, and cheap. The poem then slides from "in it" to "on it," as though the speaker's inner picture were really a flat surface, a sheet of "sheet-metal gray."
On that surface the poem's strangest image appears: "a wounded robot hand-painted white / to wander // across the wastes where my human mind // once played with colors." The robot is a machine, but a hand-painted, wounded one, so it is half-human. The wasteland is the speaker's own mind, and the verb "once" admits that something has been lost. The robot works as a stand-in, a way of looking at the self from a little distance.
It is also the one that succeeds. It is "collecting glints off smooth-faced / granite with its sensitive sensors for eyes," and the soft, hissing s sounds feel like the opposite of the opening clang. What the speaker failed to seize with a trap, the robot gathers simply by being sensitive. The poem never says so, but its logic implies that glints cannot be caught by force and can only be received. The ending is careful about this: the glints "will help fill its hollow, / a hollow suddenly sounding less metal." The pronoun has moved from "my" to "its," and the hollow is "less" metal, not free of it. The relief is real but modest.
The form matches this restraint. There is no meter and no rhyme scheme, only short, uneven stanzas and lines that break mid-thought ("the tender / trap," "was more / sheet-metal gray"), which keeps the reader slightly off balance. Faint sound-echoes such as "cinders" and "tender" pass for rhyme without settling into a pattern, and flat statements like "Today is Wednesday" anchor the strangeness in ordinary time.
The poem's significance lies in how concretely it makes an abstract feeling. It never names a cause, and judging by the imagery it could describe a creative drought or a low mood, but it makes the feeling audible, visible and nearly touchable. It also avoids a neat cure, offering instead the possibility that an empty place might begin, slowly, to ring a little less hard.